I agree with both of you. It is annoying that it screws up the 1st-sentence-preview of the experimental forum, but it's also annoying when you don't have the context.
The obvious solution, of course, is for slashdot to add an official method of quoting (rather than right now, where some people italicize, some prefix with >, some put it in quotation marks, and some just paste the text normally) and then have the experimental forum display the first line of non-quoted text.
It's one thing to enjoy games, but...no offense, this "Of course I just had to get one" line sounds childish.
I don't know if I'd say "childish" as much as I'd say "bought into the marketing". Of course, my award for that category goes to the guy that was interviewed on the local news Thursday morning. Here's an exact quote of what he said.
"The Playstation 3 is mainstream. It's got all of the mainstream titles. The other systems are OK but you have to get a Playstation 3 and all of the mainstream titles."
What...was he reading that interview off a Sony cue card? Maybe I'm out of touch, but what sort of gamer uses the term "mainstream" 3 times in 3 sentences and refers to "games" as "titles" twice?
It matters a great deal because what they said couldn't be done can be done.
Well, until a cloned passport successfully makes it through one of their scanners, we don't know that it can be done. One possibility (though it's probably giving them too much credit to have thought of this) is that the passports actually contain 2 sets of data: one that is readable using all of the known key (as discussed in the article), and a second set that is only readable via a secret key. The purpose of the known key it to provide passport forgers with a red herring. They think "aha...I'm much smarter than them. They thought they had this secure, but they've screwed up, and now I've got the data". Then they clone it, try to get through customs with it, and...the forgery is detected. So now...how did it fail? Did they screw up during the cloning? Who knows?
Its easy to crack a system when you can brute force it in private. It's a lot more difficult when you've got one attempt with someone standing there watching.
Again, I doubt this is the case, but it's a possibility.
the GC mini-DVDs are also a nice example. Dragged kicking and screaming into the world of optical media, they still couldn't go with something mainstream.
Yeah, and you also couldn't play your PS2 games on your XBOX. What does it matter that your games use a format that won't work on another console or player? The point with the GC was that they were keeping it's cost down at the expense of being able to play movies. They weren't trying to sell anything more than a game system.
With the Wii, they've added DVD support (presumably because by now the cost impact is minimal) but are abstaining from adding support for an unstandardized movie format (and the added expense that comes with that).
That artist is going to need a tool to do so. This is the question the original poster posited: will the tool be something that artists are already or could easily become comfortable using,
So how could they be comfortable in Photoshop in such a way as to apply to procedural textures.
They are comfortable with how to draw the texture? doesn't apply to procedural. Comfortable enough to know how to clone, dodge, and burn? Doesn't apply. Comfortable with applying layer masks? doesn't apply.
About the only concept of Photoshop that would be remotely applicable to procedural textures would be adjustment layers. And why is that? Because adjustment layers are just a couple of sliders. So sure, it could be done in Photoshop as a bunch of adjustment layers. But now you are using a tool where 99% of the tool's features are not applicable to the task at hand, and the 1% that does apply is severely sub-optimal for the task at hand. In much the same way that Photoshop's text tool would be severely sub-optimal for word processing.
There is a very good reason why 3DSmax and Maya are NOT plugins for Photoshop. That reason applies to procedural texturing too.
I can't figure out how you got Score: 5 Interesting What the hell does your food court story have to do with people waiting in line for the PS3? The people in line aren't preventing anyone else from getting in line for anything (except for the PS3, which is the entire point of lining up). It's not like these people waiting in line are preventing other people from getting their PS3's in the mean time.
The only way your story could be applicable would be if...when the doors open in a few weeks and these people rush in...half of the people ran in and grabbed all the PS3's and the other half ran in and grabbed all the games. The people holding the systems would have no games to play, and the people with the games would have no systems to play it on. If the people with the games gave them up, there would be more games by the time the next shipment of PS3s came in, and everyone would be happy.
That's the only way your story would apply. Otherwise, people waiting in line aren't unoptimizing anything.
The part about the smell and appearance....well, I can't argue with that. But the rest of your post doesn't apply
Last week on the Daily Show they were making some joke about the big news for 2006 being Bush defeats Kerry again. Yesterday in a slashdot post, someone had joked about how it would be funny if Bush won in Ohio again.
Well last night, before I had seen any election news, I decided to go check out the results so far. I googled for "cnn election" and clicked "I'm Feeling Lucky". The headline on the page was "BUSH DEFEATS KERRY". I had to do a double take before I realized it was the 2004 results page. See what happens when you get used to google being so good at reading your mind.
It lacks the assurance that your software will remain Free and open source to anyone who uses it. This is something you can do with GPL'd code that you cannot with BSD'd code; make a legal guarantee about the freedom of the software.
Uhhh...sorry, but your software remains absolutely free. The code you wrote and put out there as free will ALWAYS remain free. FOREVER. What BSD doesn't guarantee is the freedom of the code that other people add on to it.
This is code we are talking about, not people. It's not like taking a human volunteer and turning him into a private slave. The whole idea of treating this like it's some sort of human-rights issue is just silly.
If you want to call it what it is....not wanting to share with people unless they share back...thats perfectly fine. But calling the GPL less restrictive is the type of BS I'd expect to hear from a politician.
Now consider the air movement inside the camera body due to the mirror moving and the shutter opening and closing. Also consider that it's possible for some sensors to develop a slight static charge.
Theorize all you want about how unlikely it is to show up. I've got plenty of photos to show that it happens, and I'm not slow at changing lenses. Initially I was also VERY cautious about where I changed the lenses. Didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference as I still got dust on the sensor.
Target.com has those same things and they are still getting sued for not being accessible.
I guess my main issue was...how do you make a purely visual item accessible to the blind? It doesn't make sense, though in retrospect I hadn't considered the case where the disabled is purchasing a gift for someone. In that case, all they need is the name of the photograph that the person liked.
Unequivocally, yes? Well lets see...I sell photographs. Nothing at all but photographs. How do you think a blind person might pick out one of my photographs to buy, and how would you suggest I accomodate them?
And here's an interest followup. My online store uses ajax. Now granted, my implementation has complete no-javascript, fallback support, but not all ajax websites do, and in some cases I'd say a fallback option isn't very feasible. How do screen readers cope with ajax websites?
OMG!!!!! A heat sink with NO FANS and a BOX built around it so that it gets absolutely NO AIRFLOW can get incredibly hot!!!!! Who'd have guessed it?????? I wonder....if you remove the heatsink entirely, do you think there's any chance the chip itself might get hot too??????????
Well, it depends on how you go about "destroying" your credit. There are people out there that apply for tons of credit card with 0% balance transfer offers, take out PILES of cash, and stick it in 100% secure investments (insured bank accounts, treasury bonds, etc) to collect 5% or more in guaranteed interest (which is then withdrawn and paid back before the 0% offer ends). This has the side effect of temporarily trashing your credit, since all of your credit cards are highly utilized.
As long as you anticipate needing no loans in the near future, and you have means to deal with a financial emergency (either having a sizable emergency fund and/or having a large HELOC against your house), this isn't really that dangerous. You simply pay off all your cards, and in about a month your credit score is pretty close to where it used to be. Of course, theres a whole science here in how to get all the credit lines, how to withdraw from them in such away that creditors won't panic and close all your cards on you (which WILL permanently hurt your credit score), and other stuff like that. You need to beware of all the non-obvious consequences too (ex: some car insurance companies will raise your rates if your credit score drops, low credit scores could prevent you from getting a job, etc).
Its one of those things that, even though I've made some good money doing it, I would NEVER EVER encourage someone else to do it, simply because of the high probability of screwing up and the disastrous results that could come from even one simple mistake.
As a programmer, sometimes I go into a complex system to make a change. I look at the existing code, analyze it every which way, and determine that commenting out a block of code will turn off some feature. When I go to run it, the feature still shows up in certain cases. After reexamining the code a lot, I suddenly realize that there is a secondary block which, under very particular circumstances, can also do the same thing in a very non-obvious way. This type of thing is especially common in things like self-modifying code and in booby trapped code that behaves differently when run standalone vs run in a debugger.
Not being all that versed in biology, I only understand the very basics of DNA. However, I can't help but think that in something that complex, it's not difficult to imagine something like that happening. We're not even close to understanding everything that DNA does. I really don't think it's so far fetched that a part of the DNA (possibly even a part that we've already come to understand does one specific thing) could do something totally unexpected under very specific circumstances.
"User swaps the motherboard and CPU chip for an upgraded one, swaps the video adapter, adds a second hard drive for additional storage, doubles the amount of RAM, and swaps the CD ROM drive for a faster one.
Result: Reactivation is NOT required."
And here is another example of how it worked (or rather, didn't work) in XP:
Upgraded from a direct connected single hard drive to a RAID card and 2 drive mirrored array.
Result: had to waste time on the phone with Microsoft getting a new key to install again. The previous key had only ever been used 1 time.
But if you read even a little (I know, I know, it's Slashdot), he points out he isn't using ANY of their property or images
But if you read a little MORE (I know, I know, it's Slashdot) you'll see he said this: "The questionable image in my shop were, for the most part, already pulled down by Cafe Press after the first email notice I got last week."
So it would appear at one point he WAS using their images. And then his wording of "for the most part" sounds like he removed some of them but STILL was trying to profit off of a couple. I can't imagine that Cafe Press makes it THAT difficult to remove a product from your store offering, so I get the impression he was dragging his feet a bit on the matter.
Right now, there are digital cameras (Fuji S3 & S5) that use an array of alternating high/low sensitivity photocells to capture an extended dynamic range. In one of the reviews I was reading, it said this is very similar to some high dynamic range films, which use an emulsion that contains a mix of high sensitivy and low sensitivity particles in the emulsion. I don't have any more specific info than that, but I guess that's kind of how the concept evolved.
You are missing the point completely. That "completely useless metric" is exactly the metric that the display industry uses to measure and rate every display device on the market. So far it's done a pretty good job in rating display contrast, so I don't think I'd call it "completely useless".
The entire point was....that metric doesn't exactly work now that there is technology to make a pixel that emits zero luminance, so the metric needs to be fudged a little. The problem with fudging it is...if they used 0.01 as their "zero" (not sure what they used, but lets say 0.01) to come up with 200,000:1 contrast, they could just as well use 0.001 and call it 2,000,000:1 or even use 0.0001 and call it 20,000,000:1.
I suspect they went with the 200,000:1 figure because its much closer to what current displays produce, and they didn't want to make the numbers seem outrageously fake, even though in doing so they would be completely inline with the industry metric.
Oh my gosh...I work at a University and I'm surprised I didn't even think of this. I can't count the number of times that students:
1)Saved to a floppy and the floppy got corrupted. 2)Claimed they emailed it to themselves and it wasn't in their email (wrong email address? got deleted?). 3)Thought they emailed it to themselves but forgot to attach it. 4)Saved it to the hard drive of the computer (which has since been re-imaged) instead of their personal network drive.
Not just that, I like to go to the movies but I am sick of the yellow dots that flash on the screen that really is worse than a piece of hair in the lens for a few frames.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with both of you. It is annoying that it screws up the 1st-sentence-preview of the experimental forum, but it's also annoying when you don't have the context.
The obvious solution, of course, is for slashdot to add an official method of quoting (rather than right now, where some people italicize, some prefix with >, some put it in quotation marks, and some just paste the text normally) and then have the experimental forum display the first line of non-quoted text.
It's one thing to enjoy games, but...no offense, this "Of course I just had to get one" line sounds childish.
I don't know if I'd say "childish" as much as I'd say "bought into the marketing". Of course, my award for that category goes to the guy that was interviewed on the local news Thursday morning. Here's an exact quote of what he said.
"The Playstation 3 is mainstream. It's got all of the mainstream titles. The other systems are OK but you have to get a Playstation 3 and all of the mainstream titles."
What...was he reading that interview off a Sony cue card? Maybe I'm out of touch, but what sort of gamer uses the term "mainstream" 3 times in 3 sentences and refers to "games" as "titles" twice?
It matters a great deal because what they said couldn't be done can be done.
Well, until a cloned passport successfully makes it through one of their scanners, we don't know that it can be done. One possibility (though it's probably giving them too much credit to have thought of this) is that the passports actually contain 2 sets of data: one that is readable using all of the known key (as discussed in the article), and a second set that is only readable via a secret key. The purpose of the known key it to provide passport forgers with a red herring. They think "aha...I'm much smarter than them. They thought they had this secure, but they've screwed up, and now I've got the data". Then they clone it, try to get through customs with it, and...the forgery is detected. So now...how did it fail? Did they screw up during the cloning? Who knows?
Its easy to crack a system when you can brute force it in private. It's a lot more difficult when you've got one attempt with someone standing there watching.
Again, I doubt this is the case, but it's a possibility.
the GC mini-DVDs are also a nice example. Dragged kicking and screaming into the world of optical media, they still couldn't go with something mainstream.
Yeah, and you also couldn't play your PS2 games on your XBOX. What does it matter that your games use a format that won't work on another console or player? The point with the GC was that they were keeping it's cost down at the expense of being able to play movies. They weren't trying to sell anything more than a game system.
With the Wii, they've added DVD support (presumably because by now the cost impact is minimal) but are abstaining from adding support for an unstandardized movie format (and the added expense that comes with that).
That artist is going to need a tool to do so. This is the question the original poster posited: will the tool be something that artists are already or could easily become comfortable using,
So how could they be comfortable in Photoshop in such a way as to apply to procedural textures.
They are comfortable with how to draw the texture? doesn't apply to procedural.
Comfortable enough to know how to clone, dodge, and burn? Doesn't apply.
Comfortable with applying layer masks? doesn't apply.
About the only concept of Photoshop that would be remotely applicable to procedural textures would be adjustment layers. And why is that? Because adjustment layers are just a couple of sliders. So sure, it could be done in Photoshop as a bunch of adjustment layers. But now you are using a tool where 99% of the tool's features are not applicable to the task at hand, and the 1% that does apply is severely sub-optimal for the task at hand. In much the same way that Photoshop's text tool would be severely sub-optimal for word processing.
There is a very good reason why 3DSmax and Maya are NOT plugins for Photoshop. That reason applies to procedural texturing too.
I can't figure out how you got Score: 5 Interesting
What the hell does your food court story have to do with people waiting in line for the PS3? The people in line aren't preventing anyone else from getting in line for anything (except for the PS3, which is the entire point of lining up). It's not like these people waiting in line are preventing other people from getting their PS3's in the mean time.
The only way your story could be applicable would be if...when the doors open in a few weeks and these people rush in...half of the people ran in and grabbed all the PS3's and the other half ran in and grabbed all the games. The people holding the systems would have no games to play, and the people with the games would have no systems to play it on. If the people with the games gave them up, there would be more games by the time the next shipment of PS3s came in, and everyone would be happy.
That's the only way your story would apply. Otherwise, people waiting in line aren't unoptimizing anything.
The part about the smell and appearance....well, I can't argue with that. But the rest of your post doesn't apply
dang it...thats what I get for opening several tabs at once and then not reloading before reading each one.
mod parent up...+1 Interesting
Last week on the Daily Show they were making some joke about the big news for 2006 being Bush defeats Kerry again. Yesterday in a slashdot post, someone had joked about how it would be funny if Bush won in Ohio again.
Well last night, before I had seen any election news, I decided to go check out the results so far. I googled for "cnn election" and clicked "I'm Feeling Lucky". The headline on the page was "BUSH DEFEATS KERRY". I had to do a double take before I realized it was the 2004 results page. See what happens when you get used to google being so good at reading your mind.
It lacks the assurance that your software will remain Free and open source to anyone who uses it. This is something you can do with GPL'd code that you cannot with BSD'd code; make a legal guarantee about the freedom of the software.
Uhhh...sorry, but your software remains absolutely free. The code you wrote and put out there as free will ALWAYS remain free. FOREVER. What BSD doesn't guarantee is the freedom of the code that other people add on to it.
This is code we are talking about, not people. It's not like taking a human volunteer and turning him into a private slave. The whole idea of treating this like it's some sort of human-rights issue is just silly.
If you want to call it what it is....not wanting to share with people unless they share back...thats perfectly fine. But calling the GPL less restrictive is the type of BS I'd expect to hear from a politician.
Now consider the air movement inside the camera body due to the mirror moving and the shutter opening and closing. Also consider that it's possible for some sensors to develop a slight static charge.
Theorize all you want about how unlikely it is to show up. I've got plenty of photos to show that it happens, and I'm not slow at changing lenses. Initially I was also VERY cautious about where I changed the lenses. Didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference as I still got dust on the sensor.
Target.com has those same things and they are still getting sued for not being accessible.
I guess my main issue was...how do you make a purely visual item accessible to the blind? It doesn't make sense, though in retrospect I hadn't considered the case where the disabled is purchasing a gift for someone. In that case, all they need is the name of the photograph that the person liked.
Unequivocally, yes? Well lets see...I sell photographs. Nothing at all but photographs. How do you think a blind person might pick out one of my photographs to buy, and how would you suggest I accomodate them?
And here's an interest followup. My online store uses ajax. Now granted, my implementation has complete no-javascript, fallback support, but not all ajax websites do, and in some cases I'd say a fallback option isn't very feasible. How do screen readers cope with ajax websites?
The video isn't really worth watching
You can say that again.
OMG!!!!! A heat sink with NO FANS and a BOX built around it so that it gets absolutely NO AIRFLOW can get incredibly hot!!!!! Who'd have guessed it?????? I wonder....if you remove the heatsink entirely, do you think there's any chance the chip itself might get hot too??????????
Well, it depends on how you go about "destroying" your credit. There are people out there that apply for tons of credit card with 0% balance transfer offers, take out PILES of cash, and stick it in 100% secure investments (insured bank accounts, treasury bonds, etc) to collect 5% or more in guaranteed interest (which is then withdrawn and paid back before the 0% offer ends). This has the side effect of temporarily trashing your credit, since all of your credit cards are highly utilized.
As long as you anticipate needing no loans in the near future, and you have means to deal with a financial emergency (either having a sizable emergency fund and/or having a large HELOC against your house), this isn't really that dangerous. You simply pay off all your cards, and in about a month your credit score is pretty close to where it used to be. Of course, theres a whole science here in how to get all the credit lines, how to withdraw from them in such away that creditors won't panic and close all your cards on you (which WILL permanently hurt your credit score), and other stuff like that. You need to beware of all the non-obvious consequences too (ex: some car insurance companies will raise your rates if your credit score drops, low credit scores could prevent you from getting a job, etc).
Its one of those things that, even though I've made some good money doing it, I would NEVER EVER encourage someone else to do it, simply because of the high probability of screwing up and the disastrous results that could come from even one simple mistake.
As a programmer, sometimes I go into a complex system to make a change. I look at the existing code, analyze it every which way, and determine that commenting out a block of code will turn off some feature. When I go to run it, the feature still shows up in certain cases. After reexamining the code a lot, I suddenly realize that there is a secondary block which, under very particular circumstances, can also do the same thing in a very non-obvious way. This type of thing is especially common in things like self-modifying code and in booby trapped code that behaves differently when run standalone vs run in a debugger.
Not being all that versed in biology, I only understand the very basics of DNA. However, I can't help but think that in something that complex, it's not difficult to imagine something like that happening. We're not even close to understanding everything that DNA does. I really don't think it's so far fetched that a part of the DNA (possibly even a part that we've already come to understand does one specific thing) could do something totally unexpected under very specific circumstances.
The only game that ever contributed to my knowledge of a band was Descent 2 with Type-O-Negative.
Here's an example of how it worked in XP:
"User swaps the motherboard and CPU chip for an upgraded one, swaps the video adapter, adds a second hard drive for additional storage, doubles the amount of RAM, and swaps the CD ROM drive for a faster one.
Result: Reactivation is NOT required."
And here is another example of how it worked (or rather, didn't work) in XP:
Upgraded from a direct connected single hard drive to a RAID card and 2 drive mirrored array.
Result: had to waste time on the phone with Microsoft getting a new key to install again. The previous key had only ever been used 1 time.
Because I don't want even the operating system, swap, graphics, and music files encrypted.
If you don't want the swap encrypted, then why bother encrypting any of the data at all?
But if you read even a little (I know, I know, it's Slashdot), he points out he isn't using ANY of their property or images
But if you read a little MORE (I know, I know, it's Slashdot) you'll see he said this:
"The questionable image in my shop were, for the most part, already pulled down by Cafe Press after the first email notice I got last week."
So it would appear at one point he WAS using their images. And then his wording of "for the most part" sounds like he removed some of them but STILL was trying to profit off of a couple. I can't imagine that Cafe Press makes it THAT difficult to remove a product from your store offering, so I get the impression he was dragging his feet a bit on the matter.
Right now, there are digital cameras (Fuji S3 & S5) that use an array of alternating high/low sensitivity photocells to capture an extended dynamic range. In one of the reviews I was reading, it said this is very similar to some high dynamic range films, which use an emulsion that contains a mix of high sensitivy and low sensitivity particles in the emulsion. I don't have any more specific info than that, but I guess that's kind of how the concept evolved.
If you're happy with a completely useless metric
You are missing the point completely. That "completely useless metric" is exactly the metric that the display industry uses to measure and rate every display device on the market. So far it's done a pretty good job in rating display contrast, so I don't think I'd call it "completely useless".
The entire point was....that metric doesn't exactly work now that there is technology to make a pixel that emits zero luminance, so the metric needs to be fudged a little. The problem with fudging it is...if they used 0.01 as their "zero" (not sure what they used, but lets say 0.01) to come up with 200,000:1 contrast, they could just as well use 0.001 and call it 2,000,000:1 or even use 0.0001 and call it 20,000,000:1.
I suspect they went with the 200,000:1 figure because its much closer to what current displays produce, and they didn't want to make the numbers seem outrageously fake, even though in doing so they would be completely inline with the industry metric.
I told the landlord to stuff it, no one needs to know my damn bank account numbers but me.
Did you pay your rent by check?
Oh my gosh...I work at a University and I'm surprised I didn't even think of this. I can't count the number of times that students:
1)Saved to a floppy and the floppy got corrupted.
2)Claimed they emailed it to themselves and it wasn't in their email (wrong email address? got deleted?).
3)Thought they emailed it to themselves but forgot to attach it.
4)Saved it to the hard drive of the computer (which has since been re-imaged) instead of their personal network drive.
Not just that, I like to go to the movies but I am sick of the yellow dots that flash on the screen that really is worse than a piece of hair in the lens for a few frames.
You'd probably hate it more if the next reel wasn't cued up properly:
http://ask.yahoo.com/20020515.html